Kneel
by fringeperson
Summary: Sometimes, it's ego-tripping. Sometimes, it's something that you've just wanted to yell at people for oh so very long, because no one has ever listened to a thing you've ever said before. Oneshot, complete, don't own.


"Kneel before me," Loki commanded the screaming masses, but not loudly enough. They had not heard his command over their own fear. "I said," he growled softly, then slammed down the sceptre and screamed over them all - "_Kneel!_"

And they stopped. They stopped running, they stopped screaming, and slowly, a few at a time, they stopped standing. They all knelt before him.

Loki looked over them all, determined to memorise this moment. He closed his eyes to check that he could recall it perfectly, and smiled.

"That felt so good," he said, and his voice was soft, but the crowd was silent, so they all heard him.

Loki opened his eyes at the kneeling mass of people and smiled at the sight.

"Does anybody else want to try it?" he offered, his smile stretching to a grin. "It really does feel _wonderful_ to see a crowd of people on their knees before you," he said, and watched the cowering (and now deeply confused) crowd to see if any of them would be brave enough to take him up on that offer. But then he saw an old woman among them, shaking not with fear – though there was likely some of that as well – but with cold and the palsy.

He had learned magic at his mother's knee, and she had taught him healing magic as well as that which he used for his tricks, his pranks, and even in battle. This woman, with her shaking hands, sad eyes, and tight grey curls around her head, she reminded Loki of _his_ mother. At once, the smile slipped from his face, and he carefully waded through the crowd to her. The cowering masses watched with wide eyes as he helped her to her feet and conjured a thick fur to wrap her in.

"Please," he requested of her. "Will you forgive my thoughtlessness?"

"Why do you even want us on our knees?" demanded a man – of approximately matching age to the woman – who was immediately beside her.

"I do not know who coined the phrase 'heir and a spare'," Loki told the man, and the still silent and listening crowd by proxy. "But I think no one has ever considered the feelings of that spare, especially when the heir casts a large shadow, and no matter the accomplishments of the 'spare', even if the heir has none of the same achievements to his name, it is never good enough for their father. And then what should happen if the spare learns he is a foundling, and would never have inherited, even if tragedy befell the heir?"

"That is not a good excuse," the old man said firmly.

"But it is no less understandable," the woman informed the man shortly, and raised one of her shaking hands to rest against Loki's cheek. "If someone does not love you, then their opinion of you should not matter. Find someone else, someone who loves you, and you will always be worthy of everything you desire," she advised.

The soft sound of many rattling teeth distracted Loki from giving any answer. It was cold out, and a number of the people in the crowd kneeling around him had just fled from a perfectly heated cocktail gala. Not one of those women were dressed for the evening air.

Loki was quick to conjure furs for them all, and hot chocolates as well, to warm their hands and stomachs. With another gesture, Agent Barton was there at the edge of the crowd – awaiting orders like a good soldier. Loki did not doubt that the Man of Fury would send someone against him before long, but now he realised that in his own mad scramble for power and identity, he was not behaving as _himself_.

He was the god of mischief, not of subjugation. In his efforts to be seen as worthy by Odin, to be seen as equal to Thor at the very least, he had tried to force himself into the likeness of the muscle-bound fool. Why had he done so? He was smarter than Thor by a thousand measures... but by those same thousand measures was Thor more _loved_ than Loki was.

That was why. No one on Asgard, save his mother, had ever _truly_ loved him. Thor claimed to love him, but it was not truly so. Love did not belittle, and only ever mocked in jest, not in earnest. No, only Frigga had ever loved him. He was an alien three times over. A Frost Giant in Asgard. An anomaly among them, who he had believed to be his people and who had in turn been told that he was _their_ prince. Now here he was on Midgard, Asgardian or Frost Giant, he still wasn't one of them.

But it was these people who offered balm to his soul in a way only his mother ever had before.

An aircraft, armed, arrived at the scene. A man in spangled red, white and blue jumped out of the back carrying, of all things, a shield.

"Agent Barton," Loki called, and Barton was quick to his side. He passed over the sceptre to the man, and raised his hands. "We will come quietly," he promised the man out of time.

He _would_ suffer for this. Either at the hands of the one who gave him the sceptre, or at the will of his father, or possibly even at the mercy of the humans. Then again, the humans had _rules_ about how they treated prisoners, which was more than Asgard or the Chitauri had going for them.

~The End~


End file.
